Bob Morris @ Nov 2nd 2007 20:50 - Category: Unfiled ;
Feinstein and Schumacher didn’t cave by saying they will vote for Mukasey, the Atty General nominess who won’t say waterboarding is unacceptable. This is what many get wrong about the Democrats. It’s not that too many of them are cowards. The reason they vote they way they do is because they agree with BushCo. But have to pretend they don’t, at least sometimes.
Bob Morris @ Nov 2nd 2007 10:34 - Category: Credit crisis ;
It’s a truism that Wall Street runs on greed and fear. The fear factor just got cranked up for some of them. The NY Atty General is suing Washington Mutual for inflating real state appraisals while the SEC likely to investigate Merrill Lynch for hedge funds deals that “may have been designed to delay recognition of losses from mortgage securities.”
And since Merrill just purged their CEO, some in Congress are asking if $161 million in benefits and stock for him isn’t just a little bit piggy. Ya think?
Bob Morris @ Nov 2nd 2007 07:15 - Category: drought ;
The volunteer fire chief of Orme Tenn. wakes up at 5:30 am three days a week and makes a dozen round trips to a fire hydrant in Alabama, filling a fire truck with water, and bringing it back. At 6 pm the mayor turns on the water for the town’s 145 residents for three hours. That’s all they get. The town has run out of water. All water is being trucked in.
They’ve received emergency federal funds to build a pipeline from Alabama, which might be completed by Thanksgiving.
[The mayor] says the crisis in Orme could serve as a warning to other communities to conserve water before it’s too late.
“I feel for the folks in Atlanta,” he says, his gravelly voice barely rising above the sound of rushing water from the town’s tank. “We can survive. We’re 145 people. You’ve got 4.5 million people down there. What are they going to do? It’s a scary thought.”
If the drought doesn’t break, we may find out. Yikes.
The US Drought Monitor map for Tennessee shows the recent rains definitely helped some, but that 50.4% of that state is still in “extreme” or “exceptional” (the worst category) drought.
Bob Morris @ Nov 2nd 2007 00:21 - Category: Unfiled ;
How miserable is your state? The Housing Misery Index determines that by adding mortgage delinquency and unemployment rates.
Hawaii is the happiest, Mississippi the most miserable. California ranks right in the middle.
Michigan, where I went to college, ranks only slightly better than Mississippi, and has a 7.4% unemployment rate, the highest in the nation. When the economy catches a cold, Michigan gets it the worst and fastest. What will the Michigan unemployment rate be in a year as auto sales slow even more?
The delinquency rate in Mississippi is already a whopping 9.3%, with a tsunami of mortgage resets poised to happen.
Bob Morris @ Nov 2nd 2007 00:08 - Category: Unfiled ;
Subscribe
